» Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Of little practical value
Comment: This book was not what I expected, or needed. I was looking for an expert guide on HOW to create clear graphics that communicate ideas, tell a story, and so on. Instead, this book (and all of Tufte's book) have the luxurious, plodding, self-indulgent pace and haughty language of the ivory tower of academia.

Imagine someone wants to learn football. They buy a book that, rather than teaching the three-point stance or how to run a hook pattern, instead shows grainy black and white photos of rugby players and explains that football originated in Wales in 1883. Then it shows pictures of leather helmets and some more grainy shots of the Yale football team from 1920 and so on. Rather than learning HOW to play football, you are taken on a quaint exploration of how football started.

This was my experience reading Tufte's book. I was completely disappointed with his writing style and lack of practical guidance. From the reviews, it appears others have gotten more from the book than I did, because they were willing to spend time pondering Tufte's examples. But for myself, I found Stephen Few's book "Information Dashboard Design" covers the material much more comprehensively and - most important to me - practically than Tufte did.

I'll be returning my Tufte history books for a full refund.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Learn the life-or-death value of visual explanations
Comment: Third of the series of Tufte's brilliantly-done graphic design and quantitative analysis guides, this one focuses on images that provide "Visual Explanations." These images can show quantities, least significant differences, parallels, and explanations in ways that enhance and exceed text or numerical table data.

As usual, the book is lavishly illustrated with examples painstakingly reproduced and clearly printed on high-quality paper. Tufte's books feel and look classic and classy. They are a delight to any reader who loves books as objects. In short, Tufte follows his own rules in his books.

He devotes the lengthiest chapter of the book to a positive and a negative example of why clear visual explanations are so important, indeed life-or-death. His positive example is John Snow's map of London showing the location of deaths in the last great outbreak of cholera in that city in 1854. This map, visually displaying the evidence he gained from interviews, reviews of medical records, and meetings with city government leaders, helped Snow pinpoint the probable source of the cholera, and saved many lives--how many is still an open and unsolvable question which Tufte examines by showing some refactoring of Snow's visual explanations. You can read more about this amazing man Snow and his triumph in The Ghost Map by Stephen Johnson.

The negative example is the US Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, where hastily assembled tabular data and visual explanations by the engineers who designed the rockets was unable to stop the launch at the last moment. As Tufte clearly shows, pulling from that tabular and visual data, plus others presented during the follow-up hearings, better visual explanations would have illuminated the causal relationship between air temperature and O-ring failure, caused that cold-morning launch to be delayed for warmer weather, and saved the lives of the seven astronauts on the Challenger.

In sum, it is a joy to learn the value of visual explanation from Tufte's books.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book
Comment: First time I read the book I thought it is waste of money but after analyzing it further I believe that this is one of rarest book that is solely based on application rather then theory. I can relate day to day application with examples specified in book. this has also helped me to gain praises from my boss at work.

P.S: This book is not a novel/story-bookyou need to spend some time thinking also.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: another great book by Tufte on graphs
Comment: In this third book by Tufte on graphics, he provides great examples through history where good pictures conveyed important information to decision makers and bad graphics left uncetainty and indecision. A great success story is the identification of the source of the cholera epidemic in London in the 1850s. With regard to the Challenger Space Shuttle, Tufte suggests that one good picture may have convinced the NASA engineers of the need to avoid launching at low temperatures. Great pictures, great examples and great advice are found throughout the book. You may not believe that graphs can be used to answer all scientific questions but Tufte will convince you that they are important and must be done right!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Many good examples of illustrations
Comment: Many excellent examples on conveying many types of quantitative data across a wide variety of subjects. The only problem is that, to create most of these, one must be a graphic artist. If one needs to convey highly technical quantitative information, especially to layman, this gives the reader a good idea/perspective of how to explain to graphic artists hired along what general lines an illustration should be made.

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